On Wednesday, October 14, 2015 02:22:43 PM Ian Clarke wrote: > I think it's time for us all to take a step back and have a serious > conversation about where we are, and where we are going. > > Our current bank account balance is US$1,184.32, our current PayPal balance > is $1,201.60.
I vote for keeping as much of this locked as is required for 1 year of paying maintenance costs such as the server. We should also offer Arne & Florent the service of paying their travel costs for the EU-parliament thing; so please also allocate that. > Even at Xor's very low hourly rate (he could get a lot more commercially > given his skillset - which we should all appreciate him for) You just made me very happy, thank you :) I had feared I appeared like a failure after the big pull-request-merge-policy flamewar etc. I will keep trying to improve my communication skills! :) > this is less > than 100 hours of remaining availability. He needs to prepare for finding > an alternate income source Freenet is in a fortunate situation here: I can keep working for some months *without* immediate payment. I won't search a new job. I offer to write my bills as fully interest-free debt, with no time limit for payment whatsoever. "Pay as soon as there are enough donations". Also, to reduce your work, this could be batch-payment of at least one monthly invoice at a time. You don't need to bother to send $ 10 to me. I'd say as a compensation I'd like to sometimes arbitrarily reduce my hour count somewhat when I need more real life time for the stuff which is explained in the following section. I'll try to keep the reduction at less than 30%. Reasons for the decision to not get a new job are: 1) I love Freenet. I want to keep the job. We haven't even tried to do a fundraiser yet, and I think if we do actually try, we should be able to get funding. Also, I want to finish fixing WoT performance. The stuff has become part of my personal life goals and I want to get it done. The fact that the performance has been annoying users for years is something which I just cannot take anymore. I someday want to get to the point where Sone/Freetalk and all the other nice applications built on top of it are bundled by default. 2) Me and my mom's plans to move to Berlin: She's at the point in her life where she cannot maintain her house anymore, so it needs to be sold off. Emptying it out is a lot of work (~ 1-2 years left I suppose) - which by the way is one of the reasons for my previous hour count not reaching full-time work. I also personally cannot take living at the end of the world much longer, I want to get to a place where there is life. It would be stupid to get another job now: This would require churning out crazy hours to prove my worthiness, which would only delay moving to Berlin. And every month we still live here is an annoyance for us. So if Freenet cannot afford to pay me for a while, I should rather use this as an opportunity to lower my sitting-at-the-computer-time a bit and speed up the moving. My mom for sure would lend me my very basic living costs if I became her part-time "employee" to clean her place out. If you wonder why I don't just volunteer then, please notice that it would make me feel very bad personally at my age to actually live off my mom's money without paying it back. I would feel huge guilt. So I need to continue working for money to pay her back someday, even if I don't get it right away. > We have a new website in the works, which is great, and many people have > been working valiantly to support the project, but it's hard to escape the > feeling that we're almost in a "maintenance mode". The problem with that > is that you just can't generate enough excitement to attract funding in > that situation. First of all, Freenet isn't *that* dead. The mailing list looks dead, but IRC is quite alive. People just prefer IRC. And there, I feel like the influx of new people has increased a lot the past years. With regards to funding: I think finishing the new website definitely is something we should do before a fundraiser. But nevertheless, I would say that the reason we don't get funding is much more simple than "website sucks" / "code is too difficult to understand": We just didn't even really ask for money yet! Steve and Arne did ask a few people which I am thoroughly thankful for. But a real fundraiser can be much larger: - Big red alert on the website, like Wikipedia does it. - Contact dozens of potential funders instead of 2-3. - Do a press release & contact dozens of news sites. To get a grasp of how many people we could ask, just have a look at how many I could enumerate on the Wiki in a day's work without even doing real googling: https://wiki.freenetproject.org/Fundraising I would say we wait another 2-3 weeks to see whether a volunteer steps up to contact many people; and if none does, I move from code-writing to fundraising. I would of course prefer to keep writing code as getting WoT fixed is the more difficult task. Perhaps I'm also better at interacting with computers than humans :D So if you're a volunteer and feel like doing fundraising, please say so :) > I will be the first to admit that I have had very limited time to devote to > the project in recent years. I have been much more of an administrator > than a leader. I don't claim otherwise. Don't feel ashamed, your contribution is appreciated a lot even though it produces no shiny blinkenlights: It's not a regular thing that someone who doesn't write code in a project anymore still replies to all inquiries. Also, programmers don't usually bother to keep up with the annoying task of doing the paperwork required to run a foundation. These are very special services of you, and you're a big help with that. It's quite possible that we don't have anyone else we could bother with this hassle, so I'm very very thankful! :) > The weird thing is that, even as a 15 year old project, Freenet is more > relevant now than ever. Back in the early days we received a lot of > publicity, but it was mostly because the media thought of Freenet as an > "indestructible Napster". This completely missed the point, of course. > > But now the world has caught up with us. The Internet has been recognized > as the political tool that it is, people see the effects of Internet > censorship in controlling the debate, it seems that there is a vaporware > project almost every week that claims to do what Freenet was designed to do > over 15 years ago. Right! The NSA scandal was sort of the best thing which could happen for us. Which is why I think that all we need to do is actually do ask for money. > But unfortunately we are a 15-year-old project, and irrespective of its > new-found relevance, it's very difficult to get people excited about a > project that has been around for so long. I think to get more users, all we need is more features, i.e. more client applications. They don't care about the age, they care about what it can do. WoT is a requirement for many of those apps we already have to become deployable, so as said I really want to continue fixing it. > Anyway, I don't want to say too much because I'd prefer for this to be more > of a conversation than a lecture, but I would appreciate people's thoughts > on this. Thanks for dealing with starting the discussion. It's a good idea now to actively try to get fundraising done! So my thoughts are summarized as: Don't panic :) Greetings! -- hopstolive (keyword for Ians spam filter)
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